The most prolonged and deeply moving of Hughes's lynch poems is "The Bitter
River," a dirge for two black youths lynched in Mississippi in 1942. Hughes conceives
of the lynch terror as a bitter, poisonous river flowing through the South, a river at
which black people have been forced to drink too long. Its water galls the taste, poisons
the blood, and drowns black hopes. The "snake-like hiss of its stream" strangles
black dreams. The bitter river reflects no stars, only the steel bars behind which are
confined numberless innocents--the Scottsboro Boys, sharecroppers, and labor leaders. The
bitter river makes nonsense of liberal rhetoric:

"Work, education, patience
Will bring a better day."
The swirl of the bitter river
Carries your "patience" away.

Patience is useless, the hope in work and education a slim and distant one. The poem
ends in bitter complaint, weariness and gloom:

Langston Hughess "The Bitter
River" is a complex analysis of how racial and class oppression operate in an
articulated fashion, which suggests that the "two" facets of identity cannot be
as easily separated as current critical treatments of them too often do. The poem offers
not only an astute account of dominant oppression in the US, it teaches lessons that
contemporary critical theory would do well to heed.

First, there seems to be a subtle, dual thrust to
the recurrent reference to the speakers "dream." Hughes goes beyond the
dream of equal treatment and civil rights ominously referred to in "Harlem"
(i.e. the explosive nature of "a dream deferred") to give the "dream"
specific, divergent content in "The Bitter River." The first mention of the
"dream", strangled by the lynchers noose in line 16, is followed by a
description of it as education and vocational training. This seems to be the dream of
accommodation and "separate but equal" famously endorsed by Booker T. Washington
among others. Hughes undercuts to validity of this dream by placing the same ideals in the
white platitudes offered in lines 38-47. In line with Du Bois critique of
Washington, then, Hughes dismisses this dream as a fantasy. Yet he intensifies his
obliteration of the "dream" of vocational training as a means to better fit in
the place relegated to African Americans in a racist system by showing that even a
phantasmatic dream of racial progress is violently denied.

In the next reference to the speakers dream
in line 61, however, the context signals a shift in content. This "dream" is not
even serious enough for the racists to killthey merely mock it. This
"dream" is mentioned right after the speaker affirms that the lynched Charlie
Lang and Ernest Green are his "comrades," and the horrific insult of their
murder is heaped upon the exploitation of the speakers "labor." This
"dream," then, at least evokes a communist struggle for class solidarity in the
capitalist-racist system. Rather than Washingtons "dream" of the proper
training for menial/wage-slave jobs fully endorsed yet murdered by the racist dominant
class, this new dream is of salvation not through occupational subservience but rather
through labor equality. It is interesting that the dubious dream offered by the white
speakers must be killed but the more valid dream of labor solidarity and equality is
merely "spit" upon. This seems to suggest that the latter, more valid dream is
less of a threat to the capitalist-racist elite than even Washingtons subservient
fantasy.

Hughes intensifies this connection between the
violent suppression of black aspiration and the aloof contempt for a class-conscious
racial struggle in lines 74-75: "Tired now of the bitter river, / Tired now of the
pat on the back." The parallel structure here equates the rage about the lynchings
the speaker imbibes from the Southern river with an equal rage concerning the
paternalistic dismissal of a class-based revolutionary consciousness. While the literal
lynching of African Americans is obviously a more immediately pressing problem, Hughes
suggests that the symbolic lynching of class-based African-American struggles for equality
may be just as damaging to the race in the end. The lyncher can be clearly identified and
materially resisted. The wage-enslaving capitalist, who can enact on a large scale what
the lyncher can only do one Black man at a time, however, is a much more elusive target
for resistance.

It is also impressive that Hughes maintains this
connection between physical, violent, and murderous oppression and a more subtle,
class-based oppression through starvation 25 years later in "The Backlash
Blues." In lines 5-6 the speaker again articulates economic and bodily oppression by
mentioning "taxes," "wages," and "Vietnam" in the same
breath. This poem too gestures towards a wider solidarity. Here, however, the speaker
shows a more confident certainty in the eventual success of this class-based resistance,
for he affirms a global solidarity. The "backlash" and the slavers whip
symbolically enacted through economic oppression shifts by the end of the poem to a more
literal "backlash" against the capitalist-racist elite once the more numerous
"non-whites" of the world rise up and wrest control away from the real
"minority" in global terms: the white, racist capitalists. Instead the tension
between racial and class politics that Shulman seems to read in the various versions of
"Justice," both "The Bitter River" and "The Backlash Blues"
show Hughess remarkable ability to treat race and class in an articulated manner
throughout his career.